They’ve been extremely open about waving their white supremacist banner lately. I lived in Peter King’s district for a brief, unhappy period, and it was glaringly obvious that the majority of his constituents would be as helpless as newborn babes without the hated brown people. It’s not like these people could raise their kids, mow their lawns, cook their food, or maintain their homes by themselves.

@JAHILL10: If I were an impartial observer, I would say that people who bark like trained dogs whenever the Hate Card is presented deserve to live in a third-world hellhole. A nation of mean and stupid people does not deserve to thrive.

No matter how far you think they’ve gone, they will still be able to come up with something more offensive. I predict “We need to hang that nigger” by September, though what could come after that, I cannot imaging.

@beltane: Yes, but we’d be sharing that third world hellhole with them and I’d really rather not.

Look, these people are not known for their penchant for self reflection (see: epistemic closure) but you’d think that a few would notice that the race baiters like King never deliver on their “get rid of all the brown people” promises, they just use it to get elected and continue to receive their corporate payoffs.

Of course, that would then require them to wonder why politicians never deliver on those promises (because it is politically and socially impossible) but then the whole house of hate cards crumbles and I think I just answered my own question.

I’ve wondered since Obama got elected which politician with a national profile would go there first. Joe “you lie” Wilson came pretty close, but he stopped himself just before the n- word came out. I’m thinking either the asshat Joe Barton or one of the other South Carolina goobers.

At least he admits that the Republicans are taking the illegal immigrant problem seriously.

My guess is that the lack of interest in the prop 8 issue is more aimed at not turning off the young ones. It is a lot easier to frame illegal immigration as an economic issue and a law and order issue. It’s easier to maintain the outward appearance of tolerance; animus turns off the kids.

“The Arizona immigration law is there, there’s no reason to be raising an issue of gay rights” as a wedge, he said.

Candy Crowley – let me see if I understand you correctly congressman, so you are saying both are legitimate issues for conservatives to campaign on (demagogue), but one issue is a little more legitimate than the other.

@Cat Lady: If one of the national Repub figures does go peak racist they will lose the independents. Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I really don’t think a majority of the country is eager to “look away, Dixie Land.” That wacky, ugly 27 percent is all they got and they are welcome to it.

@burnspbesq: This type of rhetoric was Slobodan Milosovic’s ticket to electoral success. Whipping up latent hatreds and created new hatred where none existed before is a highly effective strategy in the short-term. The only thing left we have to hope for is that the Republicans are more ineffectual than the Serbs in carrying out their platform.

Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I really don’t think a majority of the country is eager to “look away, Dixie Land.”

Look, I don’t care what you do with other consenting adults, but pandering to racial fears, especially in a shitty economy, tends to go over like gangbusters in this lil’ ol’ country. Ask Mrs. Johnson!

Okay, this is seemingly really dry. It’s a tech review of 120Hz monitors, but there’s a diagram mid-page that’s had me laughing, stopping, and breaking out into chuckles, over and over again, for the last ten minutes. It’s just that awesome. Start reading at the third paragraph for the full effect.

@JAHILL10:
Not noticing is built into the system. They’re pandering tribalist in-group dogma. The basic idea is ‘Us Good, Them Bad’. As long as this man can stay Us, he can start a lotto for their sons to carry his luggage. They won’t care.

If he somehow fails their purity test and becomes Them it’s another matter, but parroting the creed is almost always enough. Again, they don’t care about results, or actions, or anything. They care about defending their own and punishing everyone else.

I’m never short of amazement over the fact that the entirety of the Republican party strategy is to appeal to a rapidly shrinking majority (older white voters) using wedge issues rapidly becoming irrelevant to the coming voting majority of people of color, and younger white voters who don’t give a care about gay marriage and have grown up knowing and being friends with people of color, and gays and lesbians.

And they are being led off a cliff by people like Limbaugh, Beck, and Rove; people who will not even be around in a couple of decades.

It will be interesting to see how history views Glenn Beck in two or three decades.

Since Republican leaders are now saying they don’t really want to repeal the 14th, just have hearings and talk about it, I think it’s perfectly fair to ask them what other amendments we should have hears on.

It will be interesting to see how history views Glenn Beck in two or three decades.

I expect Beck, Limbaugh, et.al., will be viewed in a few decades much as we view Father Coughlin today. I’m not sure Beck, Limbaugh, Malkin, Coulter, Hannity, Graham, or any other particular figure will stand out though.

Historically, I suspect the sheer profusion of such right wing, xenophobic, conspiracy mongering ranters will be of more interest than any single figure.

No need to do the election year gay bashing, because the GOP is getting their hate on for brown people. Charming.

Probably right, but also maybe an admission that the Religious Right is no longer where the action is. Now it’s the brown-people haters – and there may well be a lot of overlap, but I’d guess this means that teh Jeebus is no longer the way to appeal to the “moral majority.”

@burnspbesq: rather obvious…..50 years of race-baiting resulted in a race gap between parties, 50 years of IQ baiting has resulted in an IQ gap….for the following reasons.
1. biology– cognitive psychology and the savannah principle and the biological basis of political affiliation
2. game theory–
In gaming, people choose the game they do well at, and clever designers offer skillups, or skill levelling. Conservativism offers a kind of skill levelling for IQ and g.
Intellectuals, “elites” and fancy educations are scorned by conservatives in favor of religiosity and “commonsense”.
Being branded an “elite” or an “intellectual” in conservatism results in negative social capital.
So religiosity and commonsense are skillups for conservatives. This is called rubberband theory.
Conservatives self-select based on social levelling/skill levelling for IQ and g.
3. memetic selection–
Consider the last 50 years of memetic selection in the conservative base.
Selection for voters who can be manipulated into voting against their economic self-interest, who are sufficiently undereducated to not understand ToE and basic meiosis, who are highly xenophobic, who despise science, intellectuals and acadame and whose religiosity index is extremely high.
Its like side-effect biomemetic engineering that has produced a malleable population extremely permeable to fearmongering and demagoguery…indeed that only responds to slogans and race-baiting and IQ-baiting.

@Xecky Gilchrist: A quasi-theocratic GOP is dead in the Northeast, and whole stretches of the Upper Midwest, and the GOP has no long-term future as a Christianist, Southern, herrenvolk party. Allophobia is a far better electoral vehicle for them than theocracy.

Christopher Caldwell’s The Southern Captivity of the GOP was spot on, but premature, largely because of 9/11 and the wars, just like Ruy Teixeira’s Emerging Democratic Majority

Revolutions, like babies, come when they want to, not when we want them to come.

you’d think that a few would notice that the race baiters like King never deliver on their “get rid of all the brown people” promises, they just use it to get elected and continue to receive their corporate payoffs.
Of course, that would then require them to wonder why politicians never deliver on those promises

Because the ebill liebruls keep giving T-bones to the nigrahs, duh. Which is why they hate us so much, because if only the ebill liebruls were REAL murkans, GOOD people would all live in Paradise.

@Hal: I’m never short of amazement over the fact that the entirety of the Republican party strategy is to appeal to a rapidly shrinking majority (older white voters) using wedge issues rapidly becoming irrelevant to the coming voting majority of people of color, and younger white voters who don’t give a care about gay marriage and have grown up knowing and being friends with people of color, and gays and lesbians.

Based on what has happened in other countries, gay marriage especially is an issue that goes from “ZOMG The End Of The World” to “meh, American Idol is on” in about a week after the law is changed. The right wing kind of doesn’t want to talk about it, since there are no gay sex orgies in the streets as they promised, and the whole process is completely invisible to almost everybody except the people who can, you know, marry the people they love now.

It’s obvious to anybody with two working neurons that race and gay baiting are long term losers, but the knuckle-draggers just can’t help themselves. Any time they get half an idea and try to reach out to minorities the lizard brain ugly comes out the next day.

I don’t think that’s quite right. They have a carefully engineered hole in their critical thinking apparatus that is designed to allow ideas from designated leaders to enter their minds without the usual sanity checks. To make an analogy, their brains are like computers that have been infected by one of these nasty pieces of malware. Just like the malware, the first thing that happens is that they’re prevented from accessing information that might remove the infection. With computers it’s anti-virus software; with people it’s any media that doesn’t support the Conservative cause. Then it lets select people send new messages that bypass the normal security checks. The Republican Party- and most irrational, faith-based organizations- is a giant botnet.

How did the GOP find a power-abusing, secessionist, creationist, book-burning, pentecostal, abstinence promoting, governor who’s suing the US to have polar bears removed from the endangered species list and has an unwed pregnant teenage daughter dating a guy named after the inventor of blue-jeans?
__
It’s like she was made for them.

I humbly submit that the biomemetical engineeing, suggested by Matoko_Chan, occurred in the same facility that created Sarah Palin.

The article is mainly about the so-called “backfire” effect, wherein contrary information not only doesn’t inform but actually strengthens the existing (and incorrect) belief, thus backfiring. Seems irrational, right? Here’s what the article says about this irrationality applying across the board:
Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
In other words, the backfire effect did not occur “across the board.” It was observed among conservatives and not among liberals, at least in this portion of the study. However, blocking out facts that were inconvenient did occur among liberals, as well. This shows that liberals are not immune to these irrational tendencies, but it does not show that the irrationality discussed in the Globe article is evenly distributed across the political spectrum. I think that’s an important qualifier.
I also think that there’s a danger of PC thinking taking over here. In being careful not to encourage fantasies among liberals of being immune from these tendencies, which is an entirely valid thing to do, some writers, I have noticed, are too quick to suggest that a kind of symmetry reigns over political behavior. I don’t think we should be doing that.
By the way, here’s a link to the full study:http://www-personal.umich.edu/.....eifler.pdf

I was thinking this was the case. After prop 8 was struck down, I said to myself, “The GOP and FOX News aren’t going to scream bloody murder over this. They probably know this war is lost, and besides, there are Mexicans and mosques in lower Manhattan to whip the faithful up into a paranoid hysteria.”

@JGabriel: ‘zactly. the field lab of american politics.
Consider what my nonpara proff called the farmer method(after the Farmers Almanac)– eyeball it.
94% of scientists are not republican–70% of post baccs vote democratic.
memetic selection for lower IQ xenophobes.
what percent of conservatives are nonhispanic caucs again?

if 50 years of race-baiting resulted in a race gap between parties, why would’t 50 years of IQ baiting result in an IQ gap?

After prop 8 was struck down, I said to myself, “The GOP and FOX News aren’t going to scream bloody murder over this.”

It’s possible that they’d like to move on from gays to brown-people, but I suspect their base won’t let them leave the gays behind*. The base has a new big gay chew toy in Judge Walker, and they’re not likely to unclench their pit bull jaws to let go.

(*That double entendre really was unintended – didn’t notice it until re-reading, and it made me laugh so hard that I couldn’t bring myself to edit it out.)

Its not either/or, you know. Its all about periodicity. King is saying “its not necessary” because its not, it muddies the message and its more expensive to fight a war on two fronts. They’ve got a good enough enemy to rally the troops around right now, why start up with the other? Its more like they are leaving that field fallow until they need it again.

@Omnes Omnibus:
I think she’s just phrasing it badly. Don’t think of it as a matter of genetic breeding. Self-selection shouldn’t be a very controversial idea, should it? To simplify, the conservative philosophy is aimed at idiots because you have to be an idiot not to choke on the internal contradictions, so after awhile conservatism is dominated by idiots. Which means the process will probably spiral.

I’m not sure it’s proven, but the article Makoto quotes is at least supportive. But it isn’t exactly a bizarre theory, is it?

From what I have seen here lately, even the most egregious and stupid ideas and policies can have silver linings.

I’m sure if we look carefully, there are real pluses for the United States to turn itself into an armed camp behind a barbed curtain, run by Joe Arpaio. Aside from its ugly, nasty and cruel aspects, these new ideas seem to have a lot going for them.

Don’t let BJ turn into an echo chamber where shit is just reflexively and unthinkingly called shit every day.

Oh god, can we swap out matoko_chan’s racism for BOBs. BOB was massively more entertaining and rooted in his own bizarre fetishes which were infinitely mockable Matoko is constantly trying to justify and hide his under a veneer of ‘science’, which is a massively more dangerous act given our history.

@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Well, why should we allow that to happen? I mean if you can’t get excited about healthcare reform without a public option pony maybe people can get excited about keeping the freakin’ racist panderers from taking over the country. No matter how “enthusiastic” your average teatrads voter is, he/she can only vote once.

@matoko_chan:
This is technically true, but one thing they taught us sternly in the Bio sciences was that it’s really difficult to apply that fact. Breeding success advantages can be fantastically devious, and usually have to be proven statistically rather than guessed at.

And alas the lengthy history of Social Darwinism has shown that trying to categorize any one segment of the population as genetically stupider than the others gets disproven fast. If you’re going to try to suggest it’s inheritable within a memetic network (and again, the existence of the memetic selection I don’t question at all) you run into the difficulty of populations drifting in and out of that network, especially between generations, the extremely short lifespan of the meme (in terms of generations) and the massively complicated and hard to understand genetics of intelligence.

ah, but don’t you understand? mc has the ring of babble and the +7 invincibility cloak of science! and is waging the battle of youth and the Kuhnian Revolution! against all those who are epistemically clogged! because they do not believe as she does! She also likes t hear herself talk and has, no doubt, been patted on the head and called clever, perhaps once too often.

@licensed to kill time: Hilarious. I needed a laugh – some of the language I’m hearing from a few of the old white people around me regarding Muslims is scary. I told one 85-year-old guy that he sounds like Hitler’s followers about the Jews, after a rant that included the word “exterminated.”

He is convinced that I am brainwashed. “You bleeding heart liberals have destroyed this country. Just like your mother.”

What a nice compliment. My mom is amazing. She’s gone from being a die-hard Goldwater fan, who still had brown people as friends! To dinner in our house! to telling me last week she moved the Obama “Hope” yard sign in our garage to a safer place so we can use it again in 2012.

I think I’ll start a blog about her. She’s in the hospital now and I’m waiting for her doctor to call me back. She’s probably in kidney failure and I have to tell him no dialysis, etc. and ask if it is time for hospice at home.

@demo woman: Yes, it’s one thing to think about in a hypothetical future, and another to actually confront it. She’s told me to enforce her DNR or whatever the term is a million times. I still have the selfish impulse to hook her up to a bunch of machines and keep her here a little longer. I am now a death panel of one, maybe. Or she could get better. We’ll see.

@matoko_chan:
Er… no, we won’t have proof within the next decade. That’s kind of a big part of my point. It takes hundreds of years for a long-generation-time animal like humanity to show even a little evolution.

I just wanted to send some good thoughts your way. You are going through the hardest thing in the world. I hope it turns out well. Last year we entered the summer thinking my beloved father was about to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That would have been the end, basically. Suddenly, it all turned out well. We were lucky. He’s still here. Still himself. But the luckiest thing of all is that we love him, and we have been with him. People go through what you are going through–the “one man death panel” thing, for people they can’t stand, and never could stand, whose memories are not a blessing but a curse. Kiss your mother a thousand times. Hold her hand. Do what you have to do. She’s been a blessing to you. There’s nothing more important than that. That will endure even after this hard, hard, time is over.

Mary G. Went through it first with my dad for his uncle and then with my dad — actually, sometimes at the very instant it becomes clear and simple again because you respect them and respect their decisions — and the alternative is no better, not really.

@aimai: That is such a big help, thank you. The doctor just called me back; she is not in end-stage renal failure, but her sodium is extremely low and he thinks he can fix it, so that’s a relief. He says when it is time for hospice, he’ll let me know. She has made her wishes abundantly clear to him.

My grandmother had a major heart attack in the 1950s but recovered and despite several more lived to 1990, all but the last six months in her own house, so we have good genes on our side. She was 93, and my mom is “only” 86, so I keep telling here I get at least seven more years just for a tie. But only if it’s good quality of life.

I have no reason to think that environmental/socialization factors can’t account for right-wing behavior. I’ve seen the data with regards to education levels, but the culture of anti-intellectualism and disdain for learning and the psychological effects of a tribal mentality seem to me to be more than sufficient to account for Republican stupidity and ignorance.

You’d think, eventually, the conservative electorate would catch on that they are being played…

Only in the sense that a spoiled three-year-old is being “played” when the caretaker tells them they can play the Barney tape, or the Dora tape, or the Disney princess tape. The three-year-olds are NOT going to go outside and get some exercise, much less go pick up their toys. Giving them a “choice” of retreads to distract them enough that they’re not actively breaking stuff is the most their caretakers expect.

Everybody try refreshing the page, okay? Best I can tell, Matoko-chan busted FYWP by using a carat and the italics tag in the same comment, so I ripped the italic tag out by the roots. Now it looks okay in FireFox, at least.

They’re starting to feel so confident now, so sure of November. Truth is we probably cannot head off a disaster at this point, but the hope remains that Republican arrogance will kill them. I’m pretty sure they’ve killed their once very good chances of taking the Senate through nominating stupid assholes, and I don’t think they’ll actually take the House, but they will do a lot of damage, which will be compounded by the media and the fears inside the cabinet and the White House.

On the other hand, the shock of losing a lot seats may knock the Democratic Party into embracing the one thing that will really change the dynamic completely: ending the filibuster.

They know deep down that a day of reckoning is coming and can’t really do anything about it so they scream and yell and distract right up until the point when they can’t deny it anymore.

This can’t be part of any strategy to remain a relevant political party for the next hundred years. I would not be at all surprised to see more Ross Perot-type spoilers from the right in the future Prez elections and wingnuts just blowing shit up and going for broke to hang on to the South.

They know they’re fucked. I’ve dealt with bad tenants before. At this point they’re just going to trash the place before they get evicted.

So, we should add greater-than and less-than signs to the list … for ‘things that WordPress Really Doesn’t Like’.

Yep, though we should probably use them sparingly anyway. HTML parsers can get easily confused by them because they also signify mark-up tags, which you already know but I’m stating for the benefit of others.

I think the problem was the use of the “<" sign in conjunction with the em-dash "- -" sign.

On the one hand, it’s encouraging that the right doesn’t find ‘the queer’ issue to be as divisive right now. On the other hand, they are getting a hell of a lot of mileage out of the brown people’s are lazy/evil/elitists/stupid/skeery/ gonnacometakeyouandyourchildrenoutforabeer, which makes me depressed. The 27% who persist in believing this shit really make me look askance at the notion that we can ever be a truly harmonious/egalitarian-loving country. By the way, I love the word askance.

@matoko_chan: @matoko_chan: 99% of the ‘Savannah Effect’ is better, more elegantly, and more efficiently explained by cultural and historical factors. And IQ is a really lousy metric that is rooted in class distinctions that are not well linked to overall intelligence.

An evolutionary psychologist should have a better understanding of contemporary science regarding the range of environments in which early and early modern humans lived and in which they experienced significant selective pressure. Hint: It was not all savannah, and the environment we see now in those parts of Africa where we find hominid fossils has not been consistently that way for the last 3 million years.

And IQ is a really lousy metric that is rooted in class distinctions that are not well linked to overall intelligence.

that was possibly true in the past, but bleeding edge tech in IQ metrics is fMRI neuroscience. Catch the wave.
It is depressing to me how focused the juicers are on a 16 year old book by a shrink and political “scientist”. that isn’t hard science, and no one i know has even read that shit.

Time for a proper Anthro v. Psycho grudge match.

that sounds like mad fun. Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer is one of my lesser gods.
but not today.
im getting Warped.
l8r.

What’s truly shocking, John, is by and large they never pay a price. When will Rusho have a Arthur Godfrey moment that’ll end his career? He paid little price if any for claiming Michael J Fox was faking it. Let us pray he has a Roseanne/National Antheum moment and the public responds accordingly.